Related Clinical Services

Division of Newborn Medicine Overview

Having a baby is a thrilling and exciting time, but when your baby needs special care, you want to be in the best hands. At Boston Children's Hospital's Division of Newborn Medicine, you are. We specialize in treating babies with a wide range of congenital and acquired conditions.

In particular, we care for extremely premature infants as early as 23 weeks gestation and full-term infants with a variety of medical and surgical illnesses. We care for newborns in our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), affiliated hospital special care units and our Infant Follow–Up Program.

Our expertise

At Boston Children's, your baby will be seen by a specially trained team of physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists and other health professionals who routinely diagnose and treat newborns with critical illnesses. Our team provides supportive, family–centered care in a technologically advanced environment. We track your baby's progress beginning with our prenatal consultation program, which counsels families expecting newborns with congenital conditions. Our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit cares for at-risk newborns. And our Infant Follow-Up Program tracks your baby's development after she's left Boston Children's.

International referral center

Boston Children's NICU cares for more than 500 newborns annually and serves as a local, regional and international referral center for pre-and postnatal consultation, neonatal intensive care and infant follow–up care.

Life-saving treatments

Boston Children's is the first and only hospital in Massachusetts to offer induced hypothermia protocol to prevent secondary brain damage in newborns. This protocol may prevent or minimize the long-term consequences of brain injury due to loss of oxygen at birth, such as cerebral palsy, cognitive and visual impairments.

Top rankings

Boston Children's Hospital is ranked the #1 children's hospital in the United States by U.S. News & World Report 2014-2015. Boston Children's Hospital also ranked #1 in 8 out of 10 specialties by U.S. News & World Report. [learn more]

Patient stories

When our daughter Samantha was born six weeks premature, she had a host of medical problems. When the NICU where she was cared for since birth said there was nothing more that they could do for her, and that she would probably not make the year we were devastated. We wanted so much for her to be healthy and come home, but 20 to 30 daily spontaneous desaturation episodes (blue spells) meant that she could not.

Desperate for a second opinion, we contacted Boston Children's Hospital...[more]

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Innovations

At Boston Children's Hospital, we aim to solve some of the world’s greatest pediatric health problems. Some ways we do this stem from scientific research: Understanding diseases deeply—even at the cellular or molecular level—leads to new drugs and therapies. Other discoveries arise from moments spent at patients’ bedsides, when doctors and nurses see opportunities to improve care. This approach, which we call “clinical innovations,” often requires us to develop entirely new tools or come up with inventive strategies. This creative form of innovation is the path by which many major improvements in health care have been made.

Quality and safety

At Boston Children's Hospital, we believe that patients and families deserve to know whether the hospital where they have chosen to receive their care meets the highest standards and is committed to excellence. Through our Program for Patient Safety and Quality, we continually monitor and improve the care we provide to our patients. Since the diseases and chronic conditions that affect children and adolescents are quite different from those of adults, it is often not appropriate to use adult measures to evaluate the quality of pediatric care. That’s why we have taken a leadership role in developing scientifically sound methods to measure the quality of care provided to all children and adolescents.

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The future of pediatrics will be forged by thinking differently, breaking paradigms and joining together in a shared vision of tackling the toughest challenges before us.”